Lawrence Lessig to Leave Copyright Sphere

brandonY writes "The founder of Creative Commons, the Stanford lawyer behind the 'Eldred v. Ashcroft' case, and the author of 'Code' has spent the last 10 years working tirelessly on behalf of limited copyright terms, net neutrality, and the public domain. Tuesday, Lawrence Lessig announced on his blog that he has "decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism" from fighting the good fight for the public domain to fighting the good fight against corruption and the influence of big money's effects on legislation in general."

Comments

He's just widening his scope.

[paladinwannabe2]

After all, who thinks we'd have the copyright terms we do now if it wasn't for Disney buying off congressmen?

Re:He's just widening his scope.

[0p7imu5_P2im3]

Here's 50 "donations" to start with:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/topindivs.asp?ID=D 000000128&ContribID=U0000000007&Display=ID

More:
http://www.opensecrets.org/softmoney/softcomp2.asp ?txtName=Walt+Disney+Co&txtUltOrg=y&txtCycle=2005& txtSort=name

http://www.opensecrets.org/ is full of such records of "donations" made on behalf of Disney.
And that's just one website.

Now ask for something hard to find.
;)

Change of focus? Sorta.

[Raindance]

I believe the fundamental reason for Lessig's shift in focus is that he sees systemic money-driven corruption to be the central disabling constraint for implementing enlightened copyright/patent/etc laws.

He's done a fantastic job and played a central role in promoting a movement toward enlightened legal treatment of intellectual and creative works. Coffee all around. I don't see him as abandoning this movement, just attacking the problems facing the movement at a deeper, more fundamental level.

Re:what about the good of the internet

[Watson Ladd]

...because big companies can profit off it. I suggest reading Empire by Negri and Hardt. One of their points is that a lot of the separate struggles for freedom have the same enemy, namely the interests of the propertied class.

Re:One step beyond

[adelord]

Are you referring to the fractional reserve banking system as the source of new money? I just recently came across that, thanks to someone's sig line on here, which pointed to the "Money as Debt" instructional animation at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-905047436 2583451279 which is incredibly illuminating. It did take me a few weeks to prove to myself that it isn't bullshit though, and it helped that I have a friend who loan officer at a bank and he believes in the current system. He played a great devil's advocate.